The Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge’s longevity is nearly as astounding as the story of its builder, Horace King, part black, part white, part Catawba Indian—a man so far ahead of his time that he wore a soul patch 60 years before anyone heard of jazz.

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It doesn’t much matter what I think about Superica and The El Felix, Ford Fry’s two new Tex-Mex restaurants with almost identical menus and almost identical lines. When I asked the manager of The El Felix—in Avalon, the Alpharetta mall-city—how many diners they served, he said, “Three to four hundred on a slow night.”

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Style & Substance

How to decorate with summer's happiest hues, a Swedish midsummer celebration, where to shop on the Westside, Nancy Braithwaite on Coco Chanel, luxe life on the lake, an essay from Mary Kay Andrews, and much more in the summer issue of Atlanta Magazine's HOME.

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Southbound magazine, the newest ancillary title from the publishers of Atlanta magazine, showcases the top travel destinations in the Southeast. We visit idyllic small towns and exciting cities in search of outstanding vacation opportunities.Inside Southbound

Custom Publication

Georgia offers diverse places to see and things to do, from the mountains in North Georgia to the coasts of Savannah and The Golden Isles. Take a tour in your own backyard and visit all that our great state has to offer. Begin your tour

Dining in has its advantages: You can wear what you want, eat when you want, and drink as much as you like. To craft the perfect dinner party but skip dirtying the kitchen, look to these seven purveyors for the best meat, cheese, pasta, wine, and dessert.

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July 2015: Top Doctors

The list of doctors whom other doctors trust most. Plus, a roundtable of experts on the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease, and an Atlanta photographer documents his surgeon father’s struggle with dementia.

Don’t miss out on the last two days of Plaza’s Bond binge

The best way to see an old James Bond film is in the theater—so go while you have the chance

Here’s a quick synopsis of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: James Bond, played by George Lazenby (for the first and only time), travels in disguise to a remote research facility (literally) on top of a Swiss mountain to spy on super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Thuggish henchmen take Bond through the facility and deposit him in his room where he is told he can’t leave without an escort. Sinister indeed. He’s later retrieved and escorted to dinner; you half-expect to see Blofeld grinning maniacally from a high-backed chair, stroking his trademark white cat. Rather, Bond walks in on an array of scantily-clad women.

If you were seeing this in a theater when the film came out forty-four years ago, you might have heard nervous shuffling or a few coughs, but at a recent Plaza Theatre screening, there was a different response–laughter. And lots of it. My friend leaned over and whispered through giggles, “They can’t really be serious!”

Sure, there’s no plausible reason of a bevy of beauties would happen to lounge in skimpy outfits at this extremely remote location that Bond would just happen to visit. Still, the laughter puzzled me. This is James Bond we’re talking about; isn’t he supposed to be surrounded by women? No one laughed when Halle Berry rose out of the ocean in that orange two-piece in 2002, and I would venture to assume that back in the 1970s, the audience didn’t burst into laughter when Bond entered Blofeld’s lair.

Perhaps—thanks to Austin Powers spoofs—we’re all too jaded take the old Bond seriously.

Consider Skyfall, which plays tonight at the Plaza Theatre as part of its 007 film fest. Bond, played by Daniel Craig, is also forced to a secluded location, but he has only his family’s old, crotchety groundskeeper for company–a far cry from the ladies of the Lazenby film.

Where Lazenby’s Bond at times has the almost tongue-in-cheek “look what we’re getting away with” vibe that the Austin Powers series satirized, Craig’s Bond remains the gritty super-spy whose circumstances are fanciful, but not necessarily ridiculous.

Sure, differences are expected over the course of four decades, but Lazenby was nominated for a Golden Globe, and Skyfall did well with critics, so something must have been right about both films. Quite simply, they both appealed to their era’s audience.

Seeing the movies at the Plaza isn’t just a rare chance to see an old flick on a big screen, but also a chance to experience the series in a different way. Now’s the perfect time to go, too. Skyfall will be followed by two nights of fan favorites, so you can catch the best of both worlds. And hey, if you’re going to laugh at an old movie, it’s a lot more fun to do it with a full theater than by yourself on your couch at home. Not that I ever do that…